It’s 11:14 right now.  In 46 minutes, I’ll be 29.  And I’m all kinds of twisted about it.

It’s nothing to be worried about- I tend to get a little antsy around birthdays no matter what.  It’s not that I think getting older is a bad thing, per se.  I mean, if you’ve had more than 3 conversations with me, I’ve probably told you about how I am seriously looking forward to being old- my current plan involves having ridiculously long gray hair, wearing large flowered hats, living in a house on a beach boardwalk somewhere with my bff Mary where we will drink vodka out of teacups on our porch every afternoon while we heckle beachcombers.  I’m actually looking forward to getting old- really, really old though, the kind of old where you can walk around and be overtly eccentric without caring about society’s opinion on your slowly deteriorating mental state.

It’s all that stuff in the middle that freaks me out.

So tomorrow I turn 29.  I keep telling people that I think that 29 is way scarier than 30.  30 is a beginning, a new start, a grand adventure.  29 is “Oh crap my twenties are almost over and what do I have to show for it?”  I mean, yes, I’ve accomplished a decent amount, I guess.  But nothing mind-blowing.  Honestly, I don’t even know if I want to accomplish anything mind-blowing.  At this point, I’d be totally happy if I just felt like I knew where I was going to live in 12 months.  Here?  Somewhere else in Seattle?  Back to California?  Somewhere else entirely?  I’ve given up on planning for that stuff.

Honestly, it’s not as bad as it sounds.  Not a bone-crushing, soul-eating black cloud or anything dramatic like that, more like a nagging poke in the back of my mind.  I’ll live.  I have good friends here who are taking me out for cocktails tomorrow, good friends back home who already took me out for dinner during our Thanksgiving trip, good parents who sent me an awesome jacket (thanks Mom and Dad!) and a good husband who knows that when I get all sad and melodramatic and such, there is only one thing to do-

Mock me.

Love.